Let Your Dress Straps Drop by Nanette Rayman​Because I want justice and won’t get it, I write this to make bloodboil in your veins and for you to say Fuck,you’re cast against type in your own life.Even before this most unfair thing, even before stamens stalkedthe pistils and the man’s pollen grains luxated my body--There was that other life with its history swilling a girlhood, a womanhood of stigma where the scrim refuses to openthe universe to what I might have been.When I die,I won’t be shocked to see my eyes still lookinglike ornamental beasts out of the portalI’d searched for before this awkward abiogenesis.

Because of this most unfair thing, the Justice just outof the scrim choreographs inflorescence to hurt me.It’s the man who may as well be a machete. It’s the flowerheads all in a row pluck pluck, looking good but whippedinto subservience for lack of--You stay for a home; what is the differencebetween that and a shelter. I can’t tell.

Make no bonesabout it. Ayin ha ra the eye is evil but longand I long to find out who made me the world’s bitch,a word just come into fashion straight from the world’s ghetto.

Here is my question. I have no need for any other.My husband was exhuming my security sitting king-likein a wobbly garage sale chair, when he pointedthe phone at me, a psychotic crack head kind of urgencyin his eyes, no different than breaking my skull with a spade.Transfer money into my account. Now. Do it. You’re notgoing nowhere, lips barely moving, as I try to makemy way to the door, skin crawling and a hackthrough my heart. Out of nowhere his filthy handsaround my neck, but I can’trecall that mother and her fingers pinching without feelingthe portal. That’s what the joke is, that Justiceat the scrim. He does not meteout portions as we want them, but they say, aswe must have them. Speak to me of what I deserve.I dare you. Speak to me of my place in the worldto come.

How to escape with a few words typedon Facebook? Call the Tulsa cops—SOS. Desperationmust be taken to the end of a right address. Hereis the smell of entrapment, stinking of dirt and peduncles.& after the sunny morning, capturedas the creature turns his head to smokea Newport by the window in what had beenthe sun’s sweetest caress, I become sun--both here and formless, both not here and rapaciously formed.

Here are the cops the moment you let your heart stop, let your dress straps drop.Arrogant husband in the bedroom knowing the outcome, he was tippedoff by a call from the reader on Facebook. Your guts become somethingon the outside something to shame you, your body a brick you’d sooner throwthrough a window until the sick umbilical cord breaks.

& to think, just last night I might have been almost resignedto telling you a fake story about how a woman in the flatland where ducks skirt the sunset honking for a mate, was happyto not be a star, happy to just waste time in her body.But I’m not because the doughboy little cop hatesit when a woman claims to be heldhostage and then opens the door. Bad cop, bad cop, SpongeBob Square Chest spews his memorized script, oh! Theatre,was bad casting and demonstrational acting always so putridas it is now, taking the innocence and star-eyes out of all women?It’s all bunny-hop promenade spin of the mind in the breeze-way now. Every truth taking on another lie from Sponge Square.Women are usually the aggressors, yeah, 50% of the time, don’tyou know, so shut it, sweetie, or I’ll arrest you. Every thingtaking on the twilight of a zone that could be the portalto what is my eternity, which is to say, Baby,you’re gonna pay the man the money, yo mama ain’tcoming, she never left the porchlight on. They tell meI’m crazy and I should have been long-gone, but the yearsgo on, and each all day long they tell you whateverhappened, happened because that makes you, you.

The most unfair thing lockshorns with Justice and logic and daisies keeptime as our dreams and our imprisonment, in their strange sleepsare choreographed like a broken film reel while some stipple of saltkeeps the wounds open. And baby, off you go.

Nanette Rayman is the first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for writing. She has two poetry books published: Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty and Project: Butterflies from Foothills Publishing. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, she has published in The Worcester Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, gargoyle, Pedestal, magnolia, Oranges & Sardines, Up the StaircaseQuarterly featured writer, Red Ochre Literature, Stirring’s Steamiest Six, carte blanche, Wilderness House Literary Review, deComp, grasslilmb, Arsenic Lobster, Prick of the Spindle, Carousel and Sugar House Review where her poem, "One Potato, Two," was mentioned in Newpages.com. A story was included in DZANC Books Best of the Web 2010 and a poem, “Shoe” was included in Best of the Net Anthology 2007. She attended Circle in the Square Theatre School and the New School. She has performed in many off off Broadway shows.